Fallow: Competitive Farm Machine Championships 2013

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It’s too much in an Olympic year. Can we really cope with the news that there’s to be a Farm Machine Championships 2013? A game depicting competitive events such as… potato planting?

Part of me wants to believe that products from the likes of PlayWay and Excalibur are a trick that’s being played on me, an elaborate ruse to make me look silly because I thought Old Village Simulator 1962 and Camping Manager were real things. But that part of me knows it is wrong. And the rest of me desperately wants to share the trailer for Farm Machine Championships 2013 with you. And then see if I can start a war.

I wondered if there was a real-world equivalent to this – it would make some degree of sense if there really were such a championship that this was emulating. But the closest I’ve been able to find are tractor pulls, which seem to involve very little planting of potatoes or “bricking the straw”. Which is a shame, as if I were up at 2am and it was on, I’d watch it. Instead, watch this:

You know, one of my favourite things in the world is when a game has a “mouse click” noise when you click on a button in a menu. Just in case the mouse click noise my mouse made when I clicked it on the button wasn’t loud enough. More peculiar is how little it all seems to have to do with anything involving a championship, until finally – finally! – at two and a half minutes in, we get to see some tractor races. (It’s kind of unfortunate that it says “realistic machine handling” just as the tractors awkwardly shuffle their way into a turn.)

But, I wonder, could this be the start of an ugly war? PlayWay seem to be the new players on the block here, with only 12 games under their belt compared to Excalibur’s 89 billion. Both publishers seem to be hell-bent on making astonishingly niche games looking as though they were developed in 2002. And PlayWay’s tractor game does seem to have used an awfully familiar-looking font.

I’m so glad this is coming out on the PC instead of console, the PhysX engine makes all the difference in the world when you try and replicate wheat husk particle physics. I lost my $#)@ at 2:15 with what looks like the next great multiplayer mode — every game is going to be copying this from now on. At least we’ll know who originated.

I have participated in bricking the straw/hay a few times in my day. I drove the tractor once, and managed not to kill anybody! I found it tricky enough that I am willing to accept a championship based upon it, but less tricky than I imagine (say) motocross to be.